Tracks
/
jq
jq
/
Exercises
/
Minesweeper
Minesweeper

Minesweeper

Hard

Introduction

Minesweeper is a popular game where the user has to find the mines using numeric hints that indicate how many mines are directly adjacent (horizontally, vertically, diagonally) to a square.

Instructions

Your task is to add the mine counts to empty squares in a completed Minesweeper board. The board itself is a rectangle composed of squares that are either empty (' ') or a mine ('*').

For each empty square, count the number of mines adjacent to it (horizontally, vertically, diagonally). If the empty square has no adjacent mines, leave it empty. Otherwise replace it with the adjacent mines count.

For example, you may receive a 5 x 4 board like this (empty spaces are represented here with the '路' character for display on screen):

路*路*路
路路*路路
路路*路路
路路路路路

Which your code should transform into this:

1*3*1
13*31
路2*2路
路111路

Additional jq command line options

You'll notice extra options for jq in the tests.

run jq -s -R -c -f minesweeper.jq << 'END_INPUT'

What are they?

  • -s

    This is "slurp" mode. Instead of handling the input as a stream of JSON objects, all the input will be slurped into an array.

    $ seq 5 | jq -c '.'
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    $ seq 5 | jq -s -c '.'
    [1,2,3,4,5]
    
  • -R

    You may have seen -r already, to output "raw" strings (without quotes). This is the opposite. Each line of input is taken to be a string.

    Two examples:

    $ seq 5 | jq -R -c .
    "1"
    "2"
    "3"
    "4"
    "5"
    
    $ echo 42 | jq '. * 2'      # input is a JSON number
    84
    $ echo 42 | jq -R '. * 2'   # input is a JSON string
    "4242"
    

When you put these two options together, you don't get an array of strings: you get the entire input as a single string, including end-of-line newlines.

$ seq 5 | jq -s -R -c .
"1\n2\n3\n4\n5\n" 

Handling this is part of the challenge of this exercise.

Edit via GitHub The link opens in a new window or tab
jq Exercism

Ready to start Minesweeper?

Sign up to Exercism to learn and master jq with 12 concepts, 74 exercises, and real human mentoring, all for free.

Deep Dive into Minesweeper!

We explore nested for loops, clever use of min/max to simplify bounds checking, functional pipelines and using two-dimensional matrices.